OVP: Camille (1937)

Film: Camille (1937)

Stars: Greta Garbo, Robert Taylor, Lionel Barrymore, Elizabeth Allan, Jessie Ralph, Henry Daniell

Director: George Cukor

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Actress-Greta Garbo)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Today is my little brother's birthday, and as we are in a pandemic (and as I am 27 days away from being outside of my vaccine window-get your shot as soon as you can, wait your time frame, & remember that Covid is still deadly even if the weather is nicer so don't lose the race minutes before the finish line) I cannot spend it with him.  But he is a devoted reader of this blog, and one of my favorite people to talk about movies with, and so we will be celebrating him (long distance) today with his favorite Oscar category.  He has seen most of the Best Actress nominees, and as a result I thought it would be fun for us to do two Best Actress reviews to close out the week (that I recently saw), and since it's a special occasion, we're going to start with arguably the most famous Best Actress-nominated performance I had never seen, Greta Garbo's beautiful, tragic Camille.

(Spoilers Ahead) Based on the novel by Alexander Dumas fils (which would inspire not only countless movies but also the famed opera La traviata), the film is about Marguerite Gautier (Garbo), a courtesan who has no money to her name, and instead gets by through benefactors, many of whom dote on her beauty.  In the opening scenes she mistakes Armand Duval (Taylor) for the Baron de Varville (Daniell).  The Baron is wealthy, while Armand is of a good family (but of little money), and while the Baron makes more sense for her, she falls passionately in love with Armand.  The film continually milks this love triangle for all it's worth, with the Baron clearly the loser but still batting because he's bring much-needed cash to the table.  The film has a ticking clock as Marguerite's lavish lifestyle is exacerbating her consumption, and she will surely die if she doesn't change her ways...which she does in the end, in the arms of Armand as they realize they will always love each other.

The film doesn't have a lot going for it.  Taylor & Garbo are both sizzling (and weirdly gorgeous-one of the most attractive screen pairings in film history), but the plot isn't there.  The film constantly just keeps barking between the three legs of the love triangle, but the Baron is obviously meant to be such a villain (and Taylor so dashing) that it's not a fair fight in the world of the cinema. It's clear that Garbo must die, as she's too beautiful to grow old & too tragic to get a happy ending.  But as a result, the movie is forever repetitive.

However, you're not going to care.  This is really stylized acting, but the movie is eminently watchable (it is a guilty pleasure that clicked for me).  It's a grand picture, one with a lot of swoonworthy kisses & embraces, and you'll fall into it like thick molasses.  Did Garbo deserve an Oscar for the performance?  Probably not...there are better performances that came out in 1937 we could cling to.  But this isn't necessarily an "Oscar first" kind of performance...it's more a "swing for the rafters, land among the stars" piece of work, and in that way it's more than successful.  Oscars may be about honoring the best movies of the year, but Garbo's legendary work here has its eyes on something far more spectacular: cinematic immortality.  As perhaps the defining performance of one of the screen's most lasting stars, it gets that.

OVP: Anna Christie (1930)

Film: Anna Christie (1930)
Stars: Greta Garbo, Charles Bickford, George F. Marion, Marie Dressler
Director: Clarence Brown
Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Director, Actress-Greta Garbo, Cinematography)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

And we will see this to completion!  All week, in honor of us finally reaching the 2016 Best Actress OVP Ballot, I have decided to declare this week "Best Actress Week" on the blog, and have been reviewing daily a different Oscar Best Actress nominee that I saw for the first time during quarantine.  While we've been kind of all-over-the-board with nominations from melodramas to epic romances to action-adventures to silent war movies, today we're going to stay pretty close to yesterday's The Divine Lady in terms of timeline (just one year after), but unlike Corinne Griffith, today's star did not stay just in the Silent Era, but instead transitioned quite well into sound (in fact she did so with this film), and became a legend rather than an Oscar curiosity.  Greta Garbo was one of the last major players at MGM to transition to talkies in part because they worried about her thick accent being untenable in movies.  Garbo would prove them wrong, and would be a major star for the entirety of the decade, in part due to this film, Anna Christie, which was a big hit in 1930.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is focused on Anna (Garbo), the daughter of a Swedish sailor (Marion) who is returning home to New York after a terrible childhood spent with relatives in St. Paul, Minnesota.  She was sent there by her father who couldn't take care of her, and while there she was raped by her cousin, and eventually found herself working at a brothel.  She comes to New York in hopes of finding a new life, and falls in love with a rough-and-tumble sailor named Matt (Bickford), who wants to marry her, but she's afraid of her past coming out & him not loving her.  In a climactic scene, Anna does tell Matt that she was the victim of assault, and because she had no money, went into prostitution to survive.  Matt rejects her at first, but in the film's final scenes, they unite, realizing that their love will conquer all.

It's a short film, based on a play written by Eugene O'Neill.  The film, I'll be honest, kind of drags.  The movie's plot is pretty thin, even if we adjust for differing sexual politics about assault and prostitution ninety years after the fact-the first twenty minutes of the film have Marion, Garbo, and Marie Dressler (as an alcoholic who has also dabbled in prostitution), drunk out-of-their-minds, saying the same sort of dialogue over-and-over.  It picks up a little bit in the boat scenes, but really the whole movie's point is the climax, where we have Garbo confessing not only to Bickford, but also to her father the disappointments of her youth, and the hatred she has projected on men since they have betrayed her all her life.

This scene basically makes the whole movie worth it, and surely was the reason Garbo got an Oscar nomination.  It's rough to watch-this is pre-Code and while there are certain things that wouldn't have been able to be said in 1930, this is not 1940 where Garbo would have used veiled euphemisms to tell what happened to her, and it's interesting to watch how her character reserves more of her hate for the way that Matt & her father react to her rape & the prostitution that followed, rather than to the actions themselves, giving an understanding to the character that might have been lacking in a less gifted actress.  The ending is sugary and unrealistic, and really other than that one scene Anna Christie fails to intrigue, but as anyone who loves live theater can tell you, one great monologue can wash away a lot of flaws, and that's what happens in Anna Christie.

AFI's 25 Greatest Actresses, Part 1

So, with the recent death of Lauren Bacall, the American Film Institute's list of living "greatest actors" just got one person shorter.  Created in 1999, and for only actors who made their film debuts after 1950 (or had already passed away at the time), the list at the time was already pretty short on still-living members (only nine including the men), but is now down to three, and just one of those in females.

So in honor of this list, and Ms. Bacall, I thought it would be a cool idea to do a rundown of the actors on it, and my favorite of their performances.  This is partly both a public service and a personal bit of a shaming.  One of the sadder things that happened to me yesterday while discussing Ms. Bacall's passing was that I realized that most people I was talking to about her had never heard of her.  This is sad not only because modern cinema doesn't celebrate its past enough (cough, the Governors Awards, cough), but also because they are missing out on Ms. Bacall's work.  However, while I am certainly aware of all of the women on this list, I will admit heartily that I haven't extensively been watching most of their filmographies, and most of them have at least one major glaring miss from me in their filmography.  As a result, my Netflix queue (and hopefully yours) is going to be a lot fuller when all of this is done.  Let's start, and in anti-climactic list reading fashion, we're going to start at the top of the list instead of the bottom (they're all legends, why not mix it up as a result?).

1. Katharine Hepburn (1907-2003)

Oscar Nominations: 12, with four wins for Morning Glory, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Lion in Winter, and On Golden Pond
Probably Best Known Today For: Hepburn's warbling voice is oft-imitated, and I'm guessing that today she's best known for that rather than an actual film role.  If it is a film role, it's likely On Golden Pond, which was a HUGE success in 1981 (the second highest-grossing film of the year after Raiders-it beat Superman II, can you imagine that happening today?!?).
My Favorite Performance: This is a tough one, as Kate's one of the few actors on this list that I've seen a boatload of her movies.  I'd probably have to go with Bringing Up Baby over The Philadelphia Story, though (even though I like the latter film better) since Hepburn is just on all cylinders in that film (the jailhouse scene still leaves me in stitches).
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: This is the part of the post where I reel out certain missing elements of my cinematic credentials.  I have seen eight of Hepburn's Best Actress-nominated performances, but probably the most famous that I'm missing is Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.  It's been considered quite dated and not as good by modern audiences, but there's no denying that it certainly has a pop culture cache, so I'll go with that one.

2. Bette Davis (1908-1989)

Oscar Nominations: 10 nominations, with two wins for Dangerous and Jezebel
Probably Best Known Today For: ...Having those Bette Davis eyes.  Kim Carnes immortalized Davis in a way few of her films ever could for Generation X, but cinematically she remains forever Margo Channing, fascinating her seatbelt for a bumpy night.
My Favorite Performance: I could be provocative and pick one of her other truly strong performances (Davis was the Meryl Streep of her day, for context), but you just cannot beat All About Eve.  The phrase "she was born to play that role" is a hackneyed cliche, but I'll be damned if it isn't true here.  Claudette Colbert was originally slated to play the part, but she had to back out due to an injury, and Bette Davis gloriously filled in.
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: I'm missing a few of her Oscar-nominated roles, the most glaring of which is probably Dark Victory, a performance that probably would have won her a third Oscar before even Walter Brennan got there were it not for some Civil War film where the main character has the same name as a color.

3. Audrey Hepburn (1929-1993)

Oscar Nominations: 5 nominations, winning competitively for Roman Holiday and eventually winning the Jean Thalberg Humanitarian Award.  Hepburn would also receive the EGOT, the only actress on this list to do so.
Probably Best Known Today For: Her incomparable style (she's still regularly featured in ads for fashion houses) and Breakfast at Tiffany's, one of those few classics that has transcended generations in terms of its cultural significance.
My Favorite Performance: Holly Golightly is a tough act to beat, and I'm not going to try.  Her work in Breakfast was complicated, airy, with just enough of a scent of melancholy to keep the film grounded in Truman Capote's original story.
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: I have seen all but one of her Oscar nominated roles (I'm missing The Nun's Story), and I've actually seen most of her most significant non-nominated work (this is probably the most complete of all of the filmographies we're going to discuss today), so I'll go with that.

4. Ingrid Bergman (1915-1982)

Oscar Nominations: 7 nominations, winning three of them in one of the best track records in the history of the Oscars (she won for Gaslight, Anastasia, and Murder on the Orient Express
Probably Best Known Today For: Casablanca, one of the truly iconic classic films and one of those few films that is thrown around as an indisputable high point of the art form (in the same way War and Peace is for the novel).
My Favorite Performance: Casablanca is my favorite film, and she's my favorite performance in it, so you do the math here.  Bergman has long been one of my favorite actresses because she brought that quiet, introverted acting style that is so celebrated now to life much earlier in her career than most people did.  She's also, in my opinion, the most beautiful woman in all of classic cinema (give or take Rita Hayworth).
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: This is one of the final actors before I start ducking my head for cover and wondering if I can call myself a movie fan, as I've seen most of Bergman's most significant work.  From a curiosity standpoint you cannot beat Bergman meets Bergman in Autumn Sonata, but I think the most important film I haven't seen from her is For Whom the Bell Tolls.

5. Greta Garbo (1905-1990)

Oscar Nominations: Garbo received three nominations in her career (though four...kind of; back in the day you could be nominated for more than one film), but never won a competitive Oscar.  She did receive an Honorary Oscar in 1954, though she didn't show up to receive it (it was mailed to her house).
Probably Best Known Today For: Wanting to be alone.  Garbo's films have largely gone by the wayside in the public consciousness, but she herself remains an iconic figure of reclusion and thespian mystery.
My Favorite Performance: I have seen none of Garbo's most iconic roles, so I will go with the one Oscar-nominated performance of hers I have seen, Romance.
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: Where to begin?  Probably with Camille, which is considered her greatest performance and got her her second Oscar nomination.  And considering she landed a nod in 1939, generally considered the greatest of all movie years, Ninotchka surely should also be mentioned.

6. Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962)

Oscar Nominations: One of the only actors on this entire list with no history with Oscar, Monroe never received a nomination or a win.  She did win a Golden Globe for Some Like It Hot, however.
Probably Best Known Today For: Never having left us.  No other actress on this list can remotely compare to Monroe in the ways that they have permeated modern pop culture.  She's still on billboards, in advertisements, and sold as poster art.  Andy Warhol helped, but pretty much every pop culture scribe has at some point gone to the Marilyn well for inspiration.  Most people would struggle to name one of her actual movies, but everyone knows HER.
My Favorite Performance: Of course it would be Some Like It Hot, which is one of the greatest screwball comedies ever made and Monroe is dynamite as Sugar Kane, the ukulele player.
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: Unlike most of the public, I've actually seen most of Monroe's most significant work.  Probably the biggest miss would be The Seven Year Itch, which contains her iconic white dress subway scene.

7. Elizabeth Taylor (1932-2011)

Oscar Nominations: 5 nominations, including two competitive wins for Butterfield 8 and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; like Audrey Hepburn, Taylor also won the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, getting her Oscar count up to three.
Probably Best Known Today For: Her many marriages.  Taylor was married eight times and was a tabloid sensation, most notably for her two marriages to Richard Burton.  Taylor also became hugely identified with AIDS research in the 1980's and is perhaps the celebrity best known for her advocacy for HIV-infected people.
My Favorite Performance: It's tough to top what she did as Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and I'm not going to try-that is a performance that has to be seen to be believed, and she heartily deserved her Oscar citation.
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: I've actually seen most of Liz's most significant work, though I'm missing two big ones: National Velvet, her most iconic role as a child, and Cleopatra, the film that nearly bankrupt 20th Century FOX.

8. Judy Garland (1922-1969)

Oscar Nominations: 2 nominations for A Star is Born and Judgment at Nuremberg, though she lost for both.  Garland did pick up a Juvenile Award for The Wizard of Oz/Babes in Arms in 1939, though.
Probably Best Known Today For: The Wizard of Oz is a classic that every generation encounters on television, and Garland's Dorothy Gale is the heart of that story.  She's also the pinup for the "tragic child actor" story, as her work has long been overshadowed by her personal demons with drugs and booze.
My Favorite Performance: Definitely A Star is Born, which is really one of those brilliant art-imitating-life situations (Garland herself would become a tragically forgotten Hollywood star), and she just nails every aspect of this really superb movie (particularly that unforgettable intro in "The Man That Got Away").
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: Garland has three truly iconic films, and I have viewed all of them (the other being Meet Me in St. Louis, for those keeping track at home), so I have to go with the B-work.  I could pick Nuremberg, but she's got such a small part in that so I'll instead pick one of the MGM classics, Easter Parade.

And we'll end there and make this a three-parter.  It's now time to confess-which of these women do you love and worship and which of these ladies do you have glaring misses in their filmography (or gulp, maybe haven't seen them in anything?).  Share in the comments!

OVP: Conquest (1937)

Film: Conquest (1937)
Stars: Greta Garbo, Charles Boyer, Reginald Owen, Henry Stephenson, May Whitty, Maria Ouspenskaya
Director: Clarence Brown
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Actor-Charles Boyer, Art Direction)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

One of the most popular posts in the run of the Oscar Viewing Project thus far has been that of the Garbo/Brown collaboration in Romance, so when I saw that Conquest was buried in my TiVo, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to unearth another Garbo/Brown collaboration and make it my Saturday Morning Movie, and the next OVP film.

The movie, for those unfamiliar, is about Napoleon Bonaparte (played by Boyer) and his mistress, Countess Walewska (played by Garbo).  The film follows the first meeting between Bonaparte and Walewska, where she shows that she adores him as if like a God because she believes he will liberate her beloved Poland.  As the movie goes on, she grows disdain for him as he's clearly interested in her for "only one thing" and proves that he is just a man.  Then, quite suddenly (too suddenly, if you ask me), she decides she is back in love with him (but first she is abandoned by her husband for betraying him by trying to free Poland with her feminine whiles).  We see her by his side as he first becomes the great Emperor of Europe, and then when he is banished to Elba and defeated at Waterloo.  Throughout, she remains devoted even as he strays and marries another woman.  All-in-all, an exhaustingly epic story, and very ambitious for its time period (the film cost an exorbitant amount of money, and was actually a sizable flop at the Box Office when it first came out).

Because this is Clarence Brown, and because this film is made in 1937, Garbo's character is as saintly as can be, and her intentions always look noble, even if on the surface they are not.  My biggest problem in the film had to be the quick-turnaround for Walewska about her love for Napoleon.  While it's certainly believable that she fell in love with his power or developed some Stockholm Syndrome, since this is 1937, we don't get to see that and considering Brown's rather sexist treatment of women, I'm not willing to give him the benefit of the doubt; the Countess's unwavering devotion to Napoleon, and so suddenly, makes it hard to swallow the role and the film's love story.  This is a woman he basically forced into being his mistress, and yet we get little indication that Garbo resents him for it, even though she almost certainly would have.

I rather enjoyed the supporting parts played by Whitty and Ouspenskaya, both strong character actresses of the 1930's and both with far more realistic reactions to this egotistical emperor.  Whitty, his mother, acknowledges his weaknesses even when Garbo doesn't, and Ouspenskaya, a Countess Dowager whose mental capacities are gone (she still thinks that her friend Louis XVI is ruling France when Napoleon enters the picture), are strong character bits that the film probably needed more of-by far the best acted scene in the film, in my opinion, is the wry scene with Ouspenskaya and Boyer while they are playing cards.  Ouspenskaya thinks Napoleon is mad because he is an emperor, even though she is obviously the mistaken one.  This sense of fun is missing severely from the rest of the film, and with an actor with such an eye twinkle as Charles Boyer, that seems like a wasted opportunity.

Boyer received one of the film's two Academy Award nominations, his first of four nominations for Best Actor (he would never win, though he would win an Honorary Oscar certificate in 1942).  There's definitely a lot one can say about Boyer-he has presence, for certain, and he has the onscreen chutzpah to pull off a character like Napoleon, but his tendency toward the overcooked, and his ability to constantly be switching from love to anger and nothing in-between is a pale comparison to, say, the haunted work that Fredric March does as a fading movie star/alcoholic in A Star is Born from the same year.  The film's other nomination, however, is far more up my alley-the millions of dollars that they spend on the budget to create the elaborate castles and houses that litter the continent of Europe were well spent, as every scene creates that decadent luxury that one associates with this period in European culture.  Bonus points go to the film's opening scene, when we see a gorgeous and stately manor torn asunder by horses braying around the foyer (it sounds weird, but totally works on-screen).

All-in-all, I gotta say I'm still not impressed with Brown, and am starting to lose a little bit of hope that I ever will be (though with five more of his Best Director nominations to go, I'll have ample opportunities to change my mind).  The film's complete lack of character development, and the overwrought performance by Boyer move this to 2-stars, though the handsome production design, strong (female) supporting work, and the luminescence of Garbo keep it from falling into the 1-star column.

And, as always, we end with some food for thought-what'd you think of Conquest?  Is there a Clarence Brown film that would win me over?  And which Garbo film shall we take a journey to next?  Don't be shy-comment away!

OVP: Romance (1930)

Film: Romance (1930)
Stars: Greta Garbo, Lewis Stone, Gavin Gordon
Director: Clarence Brown
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Director, Best Actress-Greta Garbo)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

There have been many great actors in the history of cinema, but far fewer are the ranks of movie stars.  It's a rare breed, and something difficult to qualify.  After all, what makes a movie star?  Is it simply someone who is a leading actor, someone with great longevity, someone who transcends any era?  Is it an extinct species of Hollywood's Golden Age (this, I definitely disagree with-the likes of Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise, and even younger movie stars like Ryan Gosling could rank alongside the best of the 1940's and 1950's)?  Perhaps the best way to describe a movie star is o take a quote from Justice Potter Stewart out of context: "it's hard to define, but I know it when I see it."  And when I see Greta Garbo, I know I'm looking at a movie star.

One of the weird side effects of movie stars, since they always appear ageless, is that they also occasionally appear older than they actually are in their initial films, and so it's difficult to comprehend that Garbo was barely 25 when this film came out.  At the time, she had just finished her first talkie and was the toast of MGM, alongside Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford.  Her place at the top of the cinematic heap is evident with the confidence she exudes in this role, laughing and smiling gaily as she plays a "lost" woman, a beautiful opera singer torn between an older (Stone) and younger (Gordon) man.

The film is not what you'd call "strong," even by the melodramatic metric of the time.  The moral code of Gordon's character especially is horribly dated, and the fact that (SPOILER ALERT) Garbo ends up leaving him and becomes a nun is evident that the film was clearly made in 1930 and not even 1960.  And yet, Brown, a largely forgotten director now despite having six Oscar nominations to his credit, knows how to use his greatest asset, Ms. Garbo.  Every scene he lights her up with a glowing aura, as if a goddess has descended onto the screen and he only has a few moments to capture her before she fades.  It's a truly remarkable thing, and even as Garbo tosses out lines so heavy-handed they'd make John Keats look cynical, you don't particularly care.  You just want to stay on her, absorbing the magic this screen star (there's no other word for it) is radiating.

I'd write more, but I'm actually going out in a few minutes and the film is terribly short (at only 76 minutes, it's one of the shorter films to ever compete for Best Actress), but I have to end with a few questions for thought.  What do you think defines a movie star?  Was there or is there another Garbo, or was she one for the ages?  And what's your favorite of her many (largely unseen by the general public) films?